I was away last week at a client site, working with them on how to move to Author-it. They bought Author-it because they see the benefits, but, like a lot of companies who are looking to improve their workflow, they didn’t really know where to start. What would be Best Practices for them? How to get there fast so as to not interrupt the current deadlines?

They also wanted to use this move to better architect their content so they got more value out of what they have.

And so we started

We started with looking at the content they had and how they currently use it. They sell large industrial machines that are sold either 1) “as built” with no customizations, or 2) somewhat to extremely customized. They don’t do online help, so we just looked at producing PDFs. Of course, if they need to someday move to help, that’s super easy for them.

They had been doing docs in InDesign and Ventura and had to copy, save, edit, and rebuild every time a customer wanted a manual 2 type. This process took 1 to 3 days, not counting any new content development or any review time.

What they wanted to know was how to go about this process in Author-it. We walked through how to build a book and  then use variants to create the custom books. They got very excited that the 3 days of production would be reduced to less than a day.

Importing existing content

Then we started importing content from Ventura and InDesign to see what that was going to involve. It’s one thing to get new tools to improve your workflow, but if getting the content into the new tool is hard or impossible, that’s something else entirely.

The good news is that getting the content in from Ventura turned out to be super easy – we had the profile set up in under an hour. This is in large part because the docs staff had stuck to a short list of paragraph formats and didn’t play fast and loose. One of the advantages to a team that has been in place for many years is this sort of rigorous adherence to the templates.

The InDesign docs, however, are a different story. People in and outside the docs group created the InDesign docs. The adherence to the template was, well, less strict. We got the basic profile created pretty quickly, but there is going to be some pre-import work needed to put all the text in InDesign into one flow, instead of the adhoc flows it is in now, for example.

Changes to the workflow

Then we started looking at the workflow issues they needed to change to make this all work. The specific details for them are not important to us here, but the big picture is.

They needed to review how they:

• Import existing content – release states to know what’s been roughly imported, reviewed after import, ready to start publishing, and so on
• Develop content – what is truly new content and what should be reused, where to put content, how to know it’s ready for reviews
• Manage existing content – version, variants, release states, and so on
• Structure and locations of graphics folders- where to put overall graphics, product line graphics, one-off graphics, and so on
• Reuse content – what can be reused vs what is currently being reused, where to put reused content, how to name it, and so on
• Review content – how do they send out just the content that actually needs to be reviewed vs all the content in a manual, and more
• Manage localized content – they don’t do a lot but when they need to they need to right now
• Archive content and understand the history – what topics shipped in what manuals when? When was that topic changed and to what?

In sum

Even if you’re not thinking about moving to Author-it, these are all issues you must face when you move from one tool to another. You certainly can just start dumping your existing content into the new tool, but I think that many of the problems you had with the old tool are still going to be problems in the new one.

It takes planning and work to get the benefits of moving to a tool better suited to the problems you’re trying to solve.

I applaud this client for thinking this through and planning the change. It shows real maturity and that the CEO understands the value of their content.

I was really excited to work with this group and know they will be successful.

A visual

I’m including a photo I took the one warm-ish day I was there. My hotel was right on the Spokane River. One day was sunny and I took a long walk along the river to clear my head after a full day of intensive work. It was great. Being a So Cal girl, I don’t see many rivers. Ones with water, anyway.

(The client was not Kaiser Aluminum, I just liked the lovely river area with the Kaiser plant above the river.)

This is a short post, as I’m getting ready to visit with a client next week and need to wrap up projects before I do that. It’s been a rather frantic week.

But if you’re in Spokane, Washington and want to have evening drinks, send contact me and we’ll make a date.

Good news 1

Two new books are coming out about Author-it! I have specific information about the first book now and will share more about the second book in a week or two.

Learning Author-it by Char James-Tanny from XML Press is available this month. Char is a long time user of Author-it, Author-it consultant, and an all around smart person so this book should be very helpful as a reference to learning and using Author-it. I’ve not seen a copy yet, but we’re all very excited about this book.

Good news 2

This week, Paul Trotter gave a free webinar about his vision of the future of content development. We had nearly 300 people sign up, despite the day being Easter Monday holiday for much of the world. We knew the day might not be the best, but with Paul’s travel schedule, it was the only day we could get his attention for an hour.

If you missed this interesting webinar, click here to view the recording.

Lastly

I really hope to see you at the STC Summit in 2 weeks or so. We’ll have New Zealand chocolate fish to give out Monday and Tuesday, as well as interesting and informative activities in the booth.

Don’t forget the special Facebook giveaway – go to our Facebook page (Author-it) and “Like” the page to be entered into a special drawing. We have something very Kiwi to give away to the winner. You don’t have to be at the STC Summit to win.

Regardless of where you are in the world, we at Author-it would like to wish you a Happy Easter weekend.

For people in New Zealand and most of Europe, you have a 3 or 4 day holiday. It sounds like a great time to spend with your family, napping, or what ever makes you happy.

In the US, we don’t get any extra time off from work for Easter, but, as my Kiwi cohort mentioned yesterday, we do get Thanksgiving in November as a long holiday. For my cohort, the similarities are both long holidays are late Fall, early Winter for the local residents.

Something fun

As something fun, if you are attending the STC Summit in May, go to our Author-it Facebook page and Like us before May 17.  We’ll do a drawing in the booth at the Summit from the names who Like us and give something away.

Winner will be announced at the booth, on twitter, and Facebook. You don’t need to be present at the booth to win but if you are, you can take the prize with you right then.

Don’t forget the exciting webinar Monday the 25th

Don’t forget the exciting webinar next week: Content Development: Future Trends, Future Solutions Webinar, presented by Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO of Author-it Software Corporation. We have a lot of people signed up but we’ve got a little more room.

We will be recording this webinar. If you can’t attend because the date or time don’t work for you, sign up anyway. An email with a link to the recording will be sent to everyone the next day.

Whether it’s Spring or Fall where you are, enjoy the weekend and we’ll see you next week!

Aside from my work here at Author-it, I also teach part-time at several places. I really like teaching because I like being part of helping people learn stuff. Then they can go out in the world and do things I would never thought of. It feels good.

As part of almost every class I teach, I review good writing guidelines for technical communication. And then I have the students write an essay about something they are passionate about. And almost no one gets it right the first try.

I do this because, while tools are important, if you can’t write, the tools don’t matter. How many times have you looked at lovely laid out instructions that were completely incoherent? Too many, I bet.

And the guidelines are?

The writing guidelines can be summed as:

• present tense
• active voice
• second person
• 25 words or less per sentence
• 3-5 sentences per paragraph
• 3-5 paragraphs per section

For many students – and I teach active professionals as well as new to the profession – these writing guidelines are the hardest part of the class. Some students tell me that they don’t see the value of these guidelines in other, non technical, writing. I disagree.

Making it easy on your reader

Regardless of what you are writing, I think your writing can be made stronger with these guidelines. I also write creative non-fiction and use these guidelines when I write that. It clarifies my writing, reduces extra words, and forces me to say what I want to say.

Using second person lets me talk directly to my reader, making the writing more comfortable. Present tense puts the action in the “now”, making it inherently more interesting.

Shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs force you to organize your writing. It forces you to think logically and then express yourself that way. Regardless of what we’re writing, we need to be understood.

Writing is hard

If you think that writing is just dashing off some words, we all learned to write in school, it’s just talking written down – you’re wrong. Completely wrong.

Writing is hard work. It makes your brain hurt if you do it for a few hours. You’re lighting up all sorts of brain centers, trying to get the rights words down that say what you need them to say. It’s not for the faint of heart.

And it takes practice. Writing, like math, is not a spectator sport. You have to do it, redo it, and redo it again. Even very good writers think they are not very good writers because writing can always be improved.

Just for fun, try writing 1000 words about something you’re passionate about using the writing guidelines above. I did it in 446 words!

There’s a lot going on at Author-it in the near future. We have webinars and are attending conferences. These events provide you an opportunity to learn, ask questions, and meet people.

Product webinars

We have several webinars coming up, some product-specific and some tools-independant.

If you’d like to see what’s coming in Author-it 5.5, we have several webinars available for you over the next several weeks. We also have a webinar in May about importing your legacy content into Author-it.

To sign up for any of these webinars, click here. Remember, we record these webinars and make them available the day after so if the scheduled date or time don’t work for you, sign up anyway and you’ll automatically get a link to the recording the next day.

General webinars

We’re also hosting several tools-independant webinars. If you want to learn more about Component Content Management, we’re offering a webinar on that topic April 28th, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern.

Paul Trotter is sharing his vision for content development April 25 at 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. This is also a good webinar if you’re boss doesn’t quite understand what content development is about and why it’s important in this century.

And May 11 at 1pm Pac, 4pm Eastern, we have the Content Trends Survey Results webinar where we look at the data from the survey and what it means to content development professionals.

To sign up for these webinars, click here. We also record these, so again, sign up even if the time and date don’t work for you to automatically get the recording the next day.

Conferences

Author-it is attending the STC Summit May15-18 in Sacramento CA. We’ll have a booth and several of our staff will be there (including me), ready to meet you and talk about how our products can help your organization. Additionally, Kirsty Taylor is presenting tips and tricks in Author-it Localization Manager at the Summit. This is a good way to see how a real user works in Localization Manager.

If you’re not at the STC Summit in Sacramento, then maybe you’ll be at the STC India Summit May 7-8 in Bangalore, India. This exciting event includes Saurabh Kudesia talking about Planning, Managing and Implementing Content Variations using Author-it.

We’ll see you soon!

Sarah O’Keefe has written a great blog post that made me think about tech comm professionals and perfection. I have to admit, I’m in the over 40 crowd that Sarah mentions but I’m not one to hold onto a deliverable output for the sake of a deliverable output. Her main point, however, stands.

Often, technical communication professionals fall in love with a deliverable format because it pleases the tech comm professional in some earthy happy way. Additionally, a lot of work may have gone into making that deliverable format look really nice. In a way, it becomes our child – fussed over, groomed, fed.

Then time marches on

And it’s hard to leave that child and move on to another child. If we do move to another deliverable, we want the new child to be as pretty and happy as the previous child, if not prettier.

But is this drive for perfection in the deliverables really helping anything? Do our customers really care if the entire deliverable is lovely to the eye?

Maybe. If you’re writing for a high end layout product, then I think your users care how lovely the docs look. But if you’re developing content for mining equipment or industrial automation, then I think the perfect layout delivery is probably not such an issue.

Close enough is good enough for most markets

I also don’t think we add value (generally) to the deliverable by tweaking and polishing the look  past a certain point. Yes, your content should be branded and legible. But making sure every line breaks with a certain elegance is overkill.

Worse, the time you spend to make the baby its most pretty is time you could have spent making the content useful.

Useful content or pretty content? I think our users will take useful every time.

All things being equal, our users care that they have the information that helps them do what they need to do. While the look of the content certainly adds to the usability of the content, making it look “perfect” is probably not needed. Nor can you or your users afford to have the look be perfect.

Consider letting go a little and making the value of your content be the content. That’s the value we add as professionals.

I was talking to a friend whose employer has merged with another company. My friend’s company spent the last 5 years clawing its way to supportable and repeatable processes throughout the company as they build software products. If you are familiar with the 5 levels of the Capability Maturity Model, they had finally reached something close to a level 4.

It was hard and they struggled but development, testing, and documentation had stable processes that supported consistently developing products.

Then the merger happened.

Post merger

As they bring the 2 companies together, they are also breaking the company into 2 parts, based on markets. The split is not based on previous company affiliation, but rather on the needs of each vertical market both companies sell into. It makes sense to break it up this way, because the products are related but the needs of each vertical are very different.

This could all be very good, except for one thing: the company they merged with has no actual product development processes.

And that could all work if Company A (my friend’s employer) consumed Company B. But that’s not what’s happening. As they break the companies apart and regroup into 2 separate business units, the processes of each company are staying in place. Those people who are moving into the business unit that was Company A get the existing and stable processes of Company A. Those who are moving into the business unit of what was Company B get all the processes of Company B, which is to say, none.

6 levels of the CMM

My friend and I have thought for years there are actually 6 levels of the CMM. We both discovered this level when we ran our own consulting companies. We also learned to identify and then run away when we first met with these potential clients because nothing good ever happened.

The 6th level is negative 1. Working with a negative 1 level will destroy your processes if you are a contracting company providing outsourcing services, like product documentation. Think of it as entropy.

There is a place for the negative 1 level – three people creating some wild new technology in a garage somewhere can actually benefit from this level because it strongly encourages crazy mad ideas that then get tried. These ideas would be shot down any other place because they are crazy mad ideas. But for these people in that garage, it’s a creative environment that works.

The moment these people move into any level of developing the crazy mad ideas into some actual products, level negative 1 will kill them. Perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, but entropy will have it’s due.

And how do tools fit in here?

Very often, companies with few to no processes decide the problems they’re having are because they don’t have the right tools. If they got the right tools, they reason, this would all be better.

So they build a feature list.

And they buy new tools.

They don’t bother to train anyone, or set up any Best Practices for using the tools. They just buy them, install them, and then continue on the way they’ve been. And nothing changes, except some vendor somewhere got a nice fat check.

New tools are not feature lists

If you (or your company) are thinking about improving how you do the business of what you do, new tools can help a lot. But new tools also require that you look at your existing processes and be brave enough to change what isn’t working. And something isn’t working if you’re looking to get new tools.

Think of purchasing new tools as a time of reflection for your company. Identify what’s not working in your processes and then find tools that support your efforts to make it work better.

Don’t look for new tools based on a feature list – look for new tools based on the business problems you have and the business solutions you need. When you identify the business issues you need to solve, you’re going to be looking at processes as well. You can’t help it.

For most companies, the content they create is critical to the running of the business. Consider for a moment:

• Policies and procedures – state how the business is to be run, who does what and how. In industries with oversight, such as finance or medical, the business also must show auditors how the company has been running since the last audit. Failure to show this content can result in heavy fines or other bad things.
• Internal product documents – describe how products should work, the thought processes, the solutions, and so on for developing the products sold. Without these documents, a business has no idea how it builds what it builds. It also don’t know why decisions were made to do X rather than Y.
• External product documents – explain how to use the products to the people who purchase the products. If the external documents are not helpful, the business (at best) incurs an unreasonable support cost or (at worst) has a high return rate. Both impact available capital in the business. If the business functions in a regulated industry, it must keep the history of the external documents to show potential auditors how the product was described to work or potentially face large fines.
• Customer support documents – help internal support teams and external customers find a solution to their problems. For expensive internal support teams, quickly finding and understanding how to help a customer gets the customer off the phone and able to move forward. External customers who find a solution on the support site and never call is the ideal, as it costs the company less than pennies per customer.
• Training materials – few staff arrive knowing how the company works, what safety information they need to know, or how the products work. Training is how a company shares it’s tribal knowledge with the new tribe members. Many companies save a great deal of money on their insurance by making sure all new employees are trained in the required safety protocols. If the business needs to train customers on how the products work, the training center is a profit center.
• Marketing collateral – positions the products to the appropriate sales market. Few companies have a product so needed that no advertising is needed to sell the product. Failure to attract customers to the products negatively impacts the business.

Content as a business asset

The groupings above just touch on the broad types of content a business needs to manage. Even a small mom-and-pop store has some of the types of content listed above. For large international companies, the sheer amount of content assets, just as with hardware assets, for example, can be overwhelming.

Best of Breed companies know their business content is an asset that needs to be managed, just like the other assets in the company. Most companies track the computers and cell phones they use, for example. Annually, all the equipment is inventoried to make sure they have what they think they have.

Many companies never think about the business content as a business asset. The content that’s critical to the business is in Word or Powerpoint files or who knows, saved everywhere: on people’s local computers, somewhere on the network, maybe on a Sharepoint site. No one has any idea how much content they have, much less where it all is or what the most recent version might be.

If you ever wondered what Author-it products do, this is what we do. Our products help you manage your business content as the business asset it is.

In other news

We have a new line-up of free webinars coming your way in April and May. We’re really pleased with the offerings and hope you are too.

High on the list of must attends are 2 in particular:

Content Development: Future Trends, Future Solutions
Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corporation shares his vision of the future in this hour long event. You’ll leave knowing what trends are and what you need to prepare for now.
April 25 at 4pm Eastern time.  To sign up for this tools-neutral webinar, click here.

What’s New in Author-it 5.5
Additionally, we have several webinars scheduled to show you what’s coming in Author-it 5.5. To see the times and dates, click here.

I, like most geeks, am always happy to learn more about space programs. Recently several friends went to Houston and the Space Center there. They met astronauts and did other things I’m deeply envious about.

One of my friends took pictures of the documentation for the space shuttles that I thought I’d share. Click here to see the pictures.

Why do we care?

The shuttle people are very smart people. So the actual instructions are probably written at a high level of knowledge because you can trust these smart people to know a lot.

But what I found interesting was, as my friend wrote,

the formatting and layout of these. The books are printed in a large, san-serif font on card stock. The binding is open rings, so they’ll lay flat without any argument. Remember that 95% of the time, these are going to be in zero-G, so any slight tendency of a book to snap shut (from a perfect binding that would normally be fighting against gravity) would cause the book to close.

The page layout is very loose and open, and could be written on with a pencil easily. The blue tape is velcro (NASA just lives for velcro!). As you can see in some of the later pix inside the shuttle simulator, the books are velcroed in place everywhere so they can be seen easily.

Audience is everything, except when environment is everything

So, not only do we need to think about what information  our users need, we also need to think about how and when they will be using this information. Most of us are not designing information to be used in space, but what an interesting problem to solve. And what an ugly but perfect solution they found. (You have to admit, the blue velcro is ugly but very visible.)

Talk about tailoring the information delivery to the needs of the audience!

What unusual environmental information delivery problems have you solved?

If you’re interested in joining a really great group of people who actually work together as a team, then we have the place for you. We work hard, but have heaps of fun and there are some great perks to being part of the Author-it team!

Technical Writer – Immediate Start – Head Office, Albany, Auckland, NZ

Author-it is hiring a Technical Writer for their Albany office. This needs to be someone who can really hit the ground running.

Do you have 2+ years experience using Author-it and 4+ years practical experience in writing user documentation for a commercial software product? If this describes you and you can say ‘yes’ to the required skills, knowledge and experience requirements below then, send your CV along with a covering brief on how you think you can make a difference at Author-it.

Skills, Knowledge and Experience

• Requires the ability to communicate effectively across different levels of understanding (strong interviewing, listening and documentation skills).
• Strong business and technical acumen with the ability to plan, multi-task and prioritize as well as work flexibly to a deadline.
• Must have strong user documentation, design and presentation skills.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced work and cross-functional team environment.
• Passionate, work smart attitude.
• Must be detail orientated, can follow directions and established documentation guidelines as well as show a talent for new ideas and continuous improvement.

Technical Requirements

Required:

• Degree or certification in IT, technical documentation or relevant experience.
• 2+ years experience using Author-it software products
• 4+ years practical experience in writing user documentation for a commercial software product.
  • 1+ years experience in writing user documentation for web-based software applications.
  • 1+ years experience using SQL and relational databases (e.g. SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle).
  • 1+ years experience in using Active Directory and working with Microsoft server software.
  • + years experience working with images and graphics, including design and manipulation.
  • 3+ years practical experience using Microsoft Word, Help systems (e.g., HLP, CHM, WebHelp, JavaHelp) and web technologies (e.g. HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML).
  • 1+ years practical experience in quality assurance.
  • Expert command of English spelling and grammar.
  • Experience with Agile development methodologies and SCRUM.
  • Full understanding of the SDLC.

Preferable:

• Familiarity with Ext JS or other rich web application frameworks.
• 1+ years’ experience in writing user documentation for content management software applications.